Star Trek, Google, and the Dream of Universal Translation

There’s a terrible risk inherent in writing science fiction: sometime in the distant future, some nitpicking soul will remember to check up on which of your outlandish predictions come true, and which turn out to be wildly, laughably off the mark. In the case of Star Trek (of which—dare I admit?—I’ve always been an ardent fan) it seems that some of the inventions that once struck us as downright fanciful have since become familiar, everyday objects. Phasers look a bit like tasers. Communicators are merely cell phones that somehow get reception in outer space. And, though I thought I’d never live to see it, many of us have in fact traded in cloth and paper books for small, sleek, rectangular e-reading devices. Appropriately enough, hundreds of Star Trek books are available in Kindle editions.

When I read the recent news that Google has unveiled a voice-activated “Conversation Mode” for its Translate app (for Android), I immediately thought of Star Trek’s “universal translator”—that uniquely improbable and indispensable device that allows creatures from different planets and galaxies to communicate. You see, everyone only seems to be speaking English. Without the universal translators, we’d hear a cacophonous blend of Ferengi, Vulcan, Chinese, and who knows what else. Of course, very little about this technology makes any sense. Translating sound is one thing, but how can the device make it look like an alien’s lips are moving in English? Are the translators actually inside of our brains? And if it all works so seamlessly, why do so many intergalactic villains tend to speak with Russian accents? (Malfunctions are blessedly rare, but die hard trekkies may recall “Little Green Men,” an episode of Deep Space Nine in which damaged universal translators make for some brief mischief.)

Google Translate’s “Conversation Mode” is a bit more down-to-earth. The program in its current, experimental incarnation can only be used for translating between English and Spanish (no Klingon yet). You speak into the microphone in English, and then the phone repeats what you’ve said in Spanish, so that your Spanish-speaking friend can understand. She answers in Spanish, the phone translates for you in English, and so on. It’s not quite as sexy as the universal translator, but it’s a start. You can watch an early and reasonably successful demo of the app (using German instead of Spanish) here.

One can envision the misunderstandings and awkward situations that this fledgling technology might produce. Google Translate is a big step up from the earlier, more primitive translation websites, but the potential for bizarre and embarrassing errors remains. I don’t relish the thought of a cold robotic voice barking out what are meant to be my words in a language I don’t understand. When the announcement came in October that Google is working to develop an algorithm to translate poetry, I was one of the naysayers who scoffed. Computers are becoming very smart, I thought, but some tasks are better left to bilingual humans.

Nonetheless, the impulse behind Google Translate—and the hokey Star Trek universal translator—is really quite sweet: people desperately want to understand one another. With inventions like these, imperfect though they may be, comes a tingle of excitement: what if we really could talk to anyone, anytime, without a (human) intermediary? It’s a utopian dream. Google’s Awaneesh Verma puts it this way: “It’s really rewarding for us to see how this new platform is helping us break down language barriers the world over.” At the very least, some future version of the Conversation Mode might make travelers in foreign countries feel a little less helpless. Google Translate is certainly faster than a pocket dictionary.

And let’s not forget that there probably isn’t any such thing as perfect translation, anyway. Think of the stirring tag line from Star Trek, which features perhaps the most famous split-infinitive in the history of the English language: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” I plugged “to boldly go” into Google Translate—knowing, of course, that infinitives cannot be split in Spanish—and got “para ir con valentía.” Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Spanish-speaking sci-fi fans: do you have other ideas?